Misconceptions about framing

My last post brought up some comments which reminded me of common “misconceptions” about Frame Semantics. Here are some extracts from George Lakoff’s book, Thinking Points, which will hopefully clarify things a little…

Frames and Brains

“Framing” is not primarily about politics or political messaging, or communication. It isfar more fundamental than that: Frames are the mental structures that allow humanbeings to understand reality—and sometimes to create what we take to be reality.But the discovery and use of frames does have an enormous bearing on politics.Given our media-obsessed, fast-paced, talking-points political culture, it’s critical thatwe understand the nature of framing and how it can be used.

Political framing is really applied cognitive science. Frames facilitate our most basicinteractions with the world—they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the waywe reason, and they even impact how we perceive and how we act. For the most part,our use of frames is unconscious and automatic—we use them without realizing it.

Erving Goffman, the distinguished sociologist, was one of the first to notice framesand the way they structure our interactions with the world. Goffman studied institutions,like hospitals and casinos, and conventionalized social behavior, like dating andshopping. He found something quite remarkable: Social institutions and situations areshaped by mental structures (frames), which then determine how we behave in thoseinstitutions and situations.

To describe this phenomenon, he used the metaphor of “life as a play.” For instance,consider the hospital frame, with its clearly defined roles: doctor, surgeon, nurse,orderly, patient, visitor, receptionist, janitor, and so on. There are locations wherescenes play out: the operating room, the emergency room, the recovery room, thewaiting area, and patient rooms. There are props: the operating table, scalpels, bandages,wheelchairs, and so on.

The hospital frame also has an internal logic, because there are fixed relations andhierarchies among the roles: Doctors are superior to nurses, who are superior toorderlies; all surgeons are doctors, but not vice versa; surgeons perform operations in theoperating room.

Conversely, the hospital frame rules out certain behavior, because it determines whatis appropriate and what isn’t: Orderlies or visitors do not perform operations; surgeonsdon’t empty bedpans; operations are not performed in the waiting area; visitors bringflowers to the patients, but surgeons don’t bring flowers to orderlies.

All of us know thousands of such frames for everyday conventionalized activities,from dating to taking buses to getting money at an ATM to eating at a restaurant.Many frames come with language that is meaningless outside that frame: surgeon,emergency room, waiter, bus driver, PIN. Without operations, a surgeon would bemeaningless. Just as a waiter would be without restaurants.

Political disputes are sometimes about how frames interact and whether one frametakes priority over another. Can the FBI search a congressman’s office for evidence ofcorruption? That is, does the administration frame include law enforcement jurisdictionover Congress?

Frame structures also appear on a smaller scale. Charles Fillmore, one of the world’sgreat linguists, has studied how everyday frames work at the level of sentences. The verb“accuse,” for example, is defined with respect to an accusation frame, with semanticroles: accuser, accused, offense, and accusation. The accuser and accused are people (ormetaphorical people, like corporations), the offense is an action, and the accusation is aspeech act, in particular, a declaration. The offense is assumed by the accuser to be bad,that is, illegal or immoral, and the accuser is declaring that the accused did perform theoffense.

Lessons from Cognitive Science

1. The use of frames is largely unconscious. The use of frames occurs at the neural level,so most people have no idea they are even using frames, much less what kind of frames.Thus, the conservative message machine can impose its frames without the public—progressive or not—being aware of them. For example, the “war on terror” frame hasbeen imposed by conservatives but used by independent journalists and even by manyprogressives without much comment. In another area, Time magazine ran the headline“Illegals!” for a feature article on immigration. Democrats have used the “tax relief”frame without being aware that it undercuts their own views.

2. Frames define common sense. What counts as “common sense” varies fromperson to person but always depends on what frames are in the brain and how frequentlythey are used and evoked. Different people can have different frames in their brains, so“common sense” can differ widely from person to person. However, in getting theirframes to dominate public discourse, conservatives have changed “common sense,” andprogressives have been letting them get away with it. Progressives should becomeconscious of framing that is at present accepted unconsciously as “common sense” butthat hides the deep problems.

3. Repetition can embed frames in the brain. One of the funniest bits on JonStewart’s The Daily Show is video clips it runs of right-wing leaders and spokespeopleusing the same words over and over on the same day. The technique of repetition of thesame words to express the same idea is effective. The words come with surface frames.Those surface frames in turn latch onto and activate deep frames. When repeated overand over, the words reinforce deep frames by strengthening neural connections inlisteners.

The problem of rationalism

Understanding frame analysis means becoming aware of one’s own mind and the mindsof others. This is a big task. We were not brought up to think in terms of frames andmetaphors and moral worldviews. We were brought up to believe that there is only onecommon sense and that it is the same for everyone. Not true. Our common sense isdetermined by the frames we unconsciously acquire, and one person’s common sense isanother’s evil political ideology. The truths that have been discovered about the mindare not easy to fathom, especially when false views of the mind get in the way.

The discovery of frames requires a reevaluation of rationalism, a 350-year-oldtheory of mind that arose during the Enlightenment. We say this with great admirationfor the rationalist tradition. It is rationalism, after all, that provided the foundation forour democratic system. Rationalism says it is reason that makes us human, and allhuman beings are equally rational. That is why we can govern ourselves and do not haveto rely upon a king or a pope to govern us. And since we are equally rational, the bestform of government is a democracy. So far, so good.

But rationalism also comes with several false theories of mind.• We know from cognitive science research that most thought is unconscious, butrationalism claims that all thought is conscious.• We know that we think using mechanisms like frames and metaphors. Yetrationalism claims that all thought is literal, that it can directly fit the world;this rules out any effects of framing, metaphors, and worldviews.• We know that people with different worldviews think differently and may reachcompletely different conclusions given the same facts. But rationalism claimsthat we all have the same universal reason. Some aspects of reason areuniversal, but many others are not—they differ from person to person basedon their worldview and deep frames.• We know that people reason using the logic of frames and metaphors, whichfalls outside of classical logic. But rationalism assumes that thought is logicaland fits classical logic.

If you believed in rationalism, you would believe that the facts will set you free, thatyou just need to give people hard information, independent of any framing, and theywill reason their way to the right conclusion. We know this is false, that if the factsdon’t fit the frames people have, they will keep the frames (which are, after all,physically in their brains) and ignore, forget, or explain away the facts. The facts mustbe framed in a way to make sense in order to be accepted as a basis for further reasoning.

If you were a rationalist policy maker, you would believe that frames, metaphors,and moral worldviews played no role in characterizing problems or solutions toproblems. You would believe that all problems and solutions were objective and in noway worldview dependent. You would believe that solutions were rational, and that thetools to be used in arriving at them included classical logic, probability theory, gametheory, cost-benefit analysis, and other aspects of the theory of rational action.

Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressiveshave lately been losing to conservatives.

Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral,emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns. Real rationality recognizesthese politically crucial aspects of our mental life. We advocate getting real aboutrationality itself, recognizing how it really works. If you think political campaigns areabout laundry lists of policies that have no further symbolic value, then you miss theheart of American politics. [End of excerpt]

I’m aware that this will probably lead to further misconceptions (“Are you saying we should just be irrational?”, etc). Such is the way with new “paradigms” (I’m not keen on this word, but how else to highlight that this isn’t just a new surface gloss?). It takes a while for the non-familiar to sink in. But, one step at a time…

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2 Responses

I’m interested in frames for madness, and how they change over time. I wonder how Enlightenment thinking changed the way we conceptualised madness, for example, conceiving of it as demonic possession, or a punishment for ‘bad’ behaviour.

Hi Mary. I feel pretty certain that there’s much to this, although I don’t recall Lakoff et all writing specifically about it as a theme in itself. For one thing, from the Western philosophical tradition, we’ve inherited a “faculty” theory of reason, which holds that reason is a separate faculty in its own right – separate from sense-perception, bodily movement/functions, etc. This is supposedly what makes us “human”, but cognitive science has shown this to be false. As Lakoff & Johnson put it (in ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’), “human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains”.

There’s also the question of “mind” & “self” – how do we conceptualise these metaphorically, and does this have a bearing on our ideas about “insanity”, etc? What about common phrases such as “out of his mind”, “lost control of himself”, “mental breakdown”, etc – they all express metaphorical conceptions of mind & self (eg mind as container, bifurcated self, mind as machine).

Interestingly, love is often conceptualised as madness. “I’m crazy about her”, “she drives me out of my mind”, “he raves about her”, “she’s mad about him”, etc.(Examples taken from ‘Metaphors we live by’).